Hafez Nazeri

Life and education

Hafez Nazeri was born on 30 July 1979. He is the son of the Iranian classical singer Shahram Nazeri, and from the age of three he attended his father’s singing classes.

From the age of seven he learned the tanbur and the setar (a small long-necked lute), and he studied the setar and the daf (frame drum) with Masoud Shoari.

At twenty-one he moved to the United States, where he studied composition and orchestral conducting at the Mannes College of Music in New York.

Artistic career

Hafez Nazeri played the daf on the album Heyrani (“Bewilderment”, 1996), sung by his father with the Shams Ensemble, and afterwards played the setar in his father’s concerts, among them a 1998 concert with the Kamkars ensemble in Shiraz. He is also one of the players, alongside Alireza Feyz Bashipour, on the album Avaz-e Asatir (Shahnameh-ye Kordi) (“Song of the Myths – The Kurdish Shahnameh”, 2008), whose instruments are tanbur, daf and dohol (bass drum).

In 2000 he formed the Rumi Ensemble from young musicians, and in 2005 and 2006 he took the programme “In the Path of Rumi” on tour in North America with his father. The album The Passion of Rumi, composed by him and sung by his father, was released in 2007; in Iran it was issued as Molaviyeh (“The Mevlevi Order”, the Sufi order that traces itself back to Rumi).

Hafez Nazeri designed a setar with two added bass strings, which he presented in 2009. The first part of his “Rumi Symphony Project”, entitled Untold, was released by Sony Classical in 2014.